Like, I suppose, many people for whom it isn't a personal issue, I had assumed that the Forced Marriages Act 2007 had actually made forced marriages illegal.
It turns out that it doesn't - youngsters can still be forced through physical or psychological threats to marry against their will and their only recourse is themselves to take action in the civil courts. So they need to be brave and affluent.
How many subjugated 15/16/17 year old girlies who have been dragged off to the Pakistani boondocks and married to some 40 year old would-be emigrant stranger, raped and held incommunicado for months until they've had a child then are able to abandon their family and community and find the money to take civil proceedings on their return home to the UK? If we rely on reports of such cases, then very very few is the answer.
So, one would have thought in these circumstances that the police could take action - abduction (often of a minor), rape, detaining someone against their will etc.
They can't because it's not a criminal offence.
I also thought that dowries - financial inducements to marry a particular person - were a foreign thing, a matter for foreign cultures.
It turns out that I was wrong there too.
I knew it sometimes happens in Britain of course among particular communities but I had no idea that it was in fact legislated for in British tax law as I discovered when looking into Inheritance Tax yesterday.
I may quite legally offer any putative son in law a conditional gift (in plain-speak a bribe) on condition that he marries my child. You might think there's nothing wrong with that and I could see circumstances where the parents of a particularly obnoxious daughter might be tempted. 
But, and here's the legislative nub, any money given on that conditional basis is tax free altho if I simply give the couple the same amount of money as a wedding present then everything over £3000 is subject to tax. To put it plainly, if it's a bribe it's tax free, if it's an outright gift then it's not.
You know, like so much other government legislation, equal rights for women is flim flam, designed to deceive people that anyone with power gives a damn about gender equality and justice.
2 comments:
The forced marriages a very nasty business, business it indeed is.
The dowry these days has an addition, being a Brit or other country passport availabiltyis a plus in the dowry stakes
I had awhile of years back befriended a Sikh guy re his shop. I qwite liked his old dad because we chatted lengthy on Mountabatton and a drunken architect 'cutting the throat of India' with a pencil and doubling Xing the Sikhs of the Punjab.They, the Sikhs trusting Mountbatton reqwested no signature
..A wedding had been aranged for his son of middle age to marry a Sikh cousin.
All seemed perfectly ok a couple of kids were bouncing about when I returned to UK.
Less than a month and it was news, their house had burned down..the wife and kids dead..He escaped as a miracle
He also was back on the market within weeks of the tragedy...and another cousin on the way to marriage in UK. Thus I now view all those marriages with wary eye now.
Of property and son in laws.
My brothers daughters don't marry...they gave(and it remains) rent books to their now long term partners...the partners given the title tenant..thus if the partnerships broke up no half of my brens hard worked for properties to daughters going to the (hopefully never) leaving geezers
I thought that act had made them illegal as well...I read the other week on teletext that some men are now coming out and stating that the forced marriages don't just happen to women but to men as well...Which doesn't surprise me really...It all comes across similar to domestic violence in a way to me...Everyone always concentrates on women and sort of disregard that it happens to men too...I've no doubt at all that some men born over here are taken abroad at a youngish age and forced into marriages against their will.
A dowry did use to be common in many communities but i would have thought that in the present day it is more uncommon even amgonst the wealthy...I hadn't realised that the amount of money you could give tax free as a gift had gone down...When my dad died 21 years ago my mum gave me and each of my siblings £5000 tax free as a gift for signing away our legal rights...My dad had left everything to my mum in his will but under Scottish law we were still entitled to our share...Now none of the 4 of us were interested in our share at all full stop but we did have to sign it away legally...My mum gave us the money basically because she wanted to and at the time it was up to £5000 you could give tax free...Seems to me that if a daughter is marrying someone that she's been with for ages and you as a parent know you can trust that after speaking to them you should give them a massive dowry...IF you can afford it like...Just so you can give them more than 3 grand as a present
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